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I have spent the last several weeks building a device to automatically dispense dry food to our two adorable cats. The cats need to be ona diet due to weight issues. So a certain amount of food must be given to them throughout the day.

i learned about the Arduino board soon before starting this project. So this little hobby has given me the perfect opportunity to learn more about this amazing device and its ever-expanding capabilities.

The cat feeder is basically a cylindrical container that has an opening on its side. The cylinder rests on its side and is supported by wooden dowles and rollerblade ballbearings which allow it to rotate with ease.

The rotation is provided by a wheel attached to a small motor. the signal and power is provided by an Arduino Duemilanove.

When the cylinder spins, the opening allows food to fall off when the opening faces down. A funnel system then drives the food to a Y type PVD junction which distributes the food evenly to two bowls. Since the food is dispens…

This is a basic of exploration of how I can now monitor my home's electricity consumption cost in real-time. There are many solutions to this problem. Some are more complicated than others. I needed to create a solution that did not involve any manipulation of my electric panel simply because I know very little about electrical work and did not want to mess around with high power. Ultimately I found Avatar-X's electric meter reader project. This is, in my opinion, the most elegant and unobtrusive way of obtaining the information I needed. He was gracious enough to share his wonderful code that converts the data received from the Arduino into real-time costs. In fact, most of my code comes directly from him. I just tweaked it for my own needs. Thanks again Av!

Like Av's setup, my electric meter has an infrared LED that blinks each time a KW of electricity is used. I placed an infrared photoresisitor directly in front of this LED ready to detect each time it turned on. The A…